“You told me that bit last night. I don’t want any unfresh reminiscences this morning, buddy,” Zooey said, and resumed looking out of the window. “In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. We both are. I do the same goddam thing about television—I’m aware of that. But it’s wrong. It’s us. I keep telling you that. Why are you so damned dense about it?”
“I’m not so damned dense about it, but you keep—”
“It’s us,” Zooey repeated, overriding her. “We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the Tattooed Lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed, too.” More than a trifle grimly, he brought his cigar to his mouth and dragged on it, but it had gone out. “On top of everything else,” he said immediately, “we’ve got ‘Wise Child’ complexes. We’ve never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound. At least I do. The minute I’m in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam seer or a human hatpin. The Prince of Bores. Last night, for instance. Down at the San Remo. I kept praying that Hess wouldn’t tell me the plot of his new script. I knew damn well he had one. I knew damn well I wasn’t going to get out of the place without a new script to take home. But I kept praying he’d spare me from an oral preview. He’s not stupid. He knows it’s impossible for me to keep my mouth shut.” Zooey suddenly, sharply, turned around, without taking his foot off the window seat, and picked up, snatched up, a match folder that was on his mother’s writing table. He turned back to the window and the view of the school roof and put his cigar into his mouth again—but at once took it out. “Damn him, anyway,” he said. “He’s so stupid it breaks your heart. He’s like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism, and everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn’t even—”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Certainly I told him that! I just got through telling you I can’t keep my mouth shut. Certainly I told him that! I left him sitting there wishing he was dead. Or one of us was dead—I hope to hell it was me. Anyway, it was a true San Remo exit.” Zooey took down his foot from the window seat. He turned around, looking both tense and agitated, and pulled out the straight chair at his mother’s writing table and sat down. He relit his cigar, then hunched forward, restively, both arms on the cherrywood surface. An object his mother used as a paperweight stood beside the inkwell: a small glass sphere, on a black plastic pedestal, containing a snowman wearing a stovepipe hat. Zooey picked it up, gave it a shake, and sat apparently watching the snowflakes swirl.
Franny, looking at him, now had a hand visored over her eyes. Zooey was sitting in the main shaft of sunlight in the room. She might have altered her position on the couch, if she
meant to go on looking at him, but that would have disturbed Bloomberg, in her lap, who appeared to be asleep. “Do you really have an ulcer?” she asked suddenly. “Mother said you have an ulcer.”
“Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer’s a goddam spy.” He gave the snowman another, more vigorous shake. “The funny part is,” he said, “I like Hess. Or at least I like him when he’s not shoving his artistic poverty down my throat. At least he wears horrible neckties and funny padded suits in the middle of that frightened, super-conservative, super-conforming madhouse. And I like his conceit. He’s so conceited he’s actually humble, the crazy bastard. I mean he obviously thinks television’s good enough to deserve him and his big, bogus-courageous, ‘offbeat’ talent—which is a crazy kind of humility, if you feel like thinking about it.” He stared at the glass ball till the snowstorm had abated somewhat. “In a way, I sort of like LeSage, too. Everything he owns is the best—his overcoat, his two-cabin cruiser, his son’s grades at Harvard, his electric razor, everything. He took me home to dinner once and stopped me in the driveway to ask me if I remembered ‘the late Carole Lombard, in the movies.’ He warned me I’d get a shock when I met his wife, she was such a dead ringer for Carole Lombard. I suppose I’ll like him for that till I die. His wife turned out to be a really tired, bosomy, Persian-looking blonde.” Zooey looked around abruptly at Franny, who had said something. “What?” he asked.
“Yes!” Franny repeated—pale, but beaming, and apparently fated, too, to like Mr. LeSage till death.
Zooey smoked his cigar in silence for a moment. “What gets me so down about Dick Hess,” he said, “what makes me so sad, or furious, or whatever the hell I am, is that the first script he did for LeSage was pretty good. It was almost good, in fact. It was the first one we did on film—I don’t think you saw it, you were at school or something. I played a young farmer in it who lives all alone with his father. The boy has a notion that he hates farming, and he and his father have always had a terrible time making a living, so when the father dies, he sells all the cattle and makes big plans to go to the big city to make a living,” Zooey picked up the snowman again but didn’t give it a shake—merely turned it around, by the pedestal. “It had some nice bits,” he said. “After I sell all the cows, I keep going out to the pasture to look for them. And when I go for a farewell walk with my girl, right before I leave for the big city, I keep steering her over toward the empty pasture. Then, when I get to the big city and get a job, I spend all my spare time hanging around the stockyards. Finally, in heavy traffic on the main street in the big city, a car makes a left turn and changes into a cow. I run after it, just as the light changes, and get run over—stampeded.” He gave the snowman a shake. “It probably wasn’t anything you couldn’t watch while you were cutting your toenails, but at least you didn’t feel like slinking home from the studio after rehearsals. It was fresh enough, at least, and it was his own, it wasn’t part of a hackneyed trend in scripts. I wish to hell he’d go home and fill up again. I wish to hell everybody’d go home. I’m sick to death of being the heavy in everybody’s life. God, you should see Hess and LeSage when they’re talking about a new show. Or a new anything. They’re as happy as pigs till I show up. I feel like those dismal bastards Seymour’s beloved Chuang-tzu warned everybody against. ‘Beware when the so-called sagely men come limping into sight.’ ” He sat still, watching the snowflakes swirl. “I could happily lie down and die sometimes,” he said.
Franny at that moment was gazing at a sunlit faded spot in the carpet over near the piano, her lips very discernibly moving. “This is all so funny, you can’t imagine,” she said, with the faintest tremor in her voice, and Zooey looked over at her. Her paleness was emphasized by the fact that she was wearing no lipstick at all. “Everything you’re saying brings back everything I was trying to say to Lane on Saturday, when he started digging at me. Right in the middle of Martinis and snails and things. I mean we’re not bothered by exactly the same things, but by the same kind of things, I think, and for the same reasons. At least, it sounds that way.” Bloomberg just then stood up in her lap and, more like a dog than a cat, began to circle around to find a sleeping position he liked better. Franny absently, yet like a guide, placed her hands gently on his back, and went on speaking. “I actually reached a point where I said to myself, right out loud, like a lunatic, If I hear just one more picky, cavilling, unconstructive word out of you, Franny Glass, you and I are finished—but finished. And for a while I wasn’t too bad. For about a whole month, at least, whenever anybody said anything that sounded campusy and phony, or that smelled to high heaven of ego or something like that, I at least kept quiet about it. I went to the movies or I stayed in the library all hours or I started writing papers like mad on Restoration Comedy and stuff like that—but at least I had the pleasure of not hearing my own voice for a while,” She shook her head. “Then, one morning—bang, bang, I started up again. I didn’t sleep all night, for some reason, and I had an eight-o’clock in French Lit, so finally I just got up and got dressed and made some coffee and then walked around the campus. What I wanted to do was just go for a terribly long ride on my bike, but I was afraid everybody’d hear me taking my bike out of the stand—something always falls—so I just went to the Lit building and sat. I sat and sat, and finally I got up and started writing things from Epictetus all over the blackboard. I filled the whole front blackboard—I didn’t even know I’d remembered so much of him. I erased it—thank God!—before people started coming in. But it was a childish thing to do anyway—Epictetus would have absolutely hated me for doing it—but . . .” Franny hesitated. “I don’t know. I think I just wanted to see the name of somebody nice up on a blackboard. Anyway, that started me up again. I picked all day. I picked on Professor Fallon. I picked on Lane when I talked to him on the phone. I picked on Professor Tupper. It got worse and worse. I even started picking on my roommate. Oh, God, poor Bev! I started catching her looking at me as if she hoped I’d decide to move out of the room and let somebody halfway pleasant and normal move in and give her a little peace. It was just terrible! And the worst part was, I knew what a bore I was being, I knew how I was depressing people, or even hurting their feelings—but I just couldn’t stop! I just could not stop picking.” Looking more than a little distrait, she paused just long enough to push downward on Bloomberg’s roving hindquarters. “It was the worst of all in class, though,” she said with decision. “That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping—and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge—when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway—is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” Nervously, and without any real need whatever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. “I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word ‘wisdom’ mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? Do you want to hear something really funny? In almost four years of college—and this is the absolute truth—in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression ‘wise man’ being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who’d made a fortune in the stock market and then gone to Washington to be an adviser to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I’m not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die.” She broke off, and apparently became rededicated to serving Bloomberg’s interests. Her lips now had very little more color in them than her face. They were also, very faintly, chapped.
Zooey’s eyes were on her, and had been. “I want to ask you something, Franny,” he said abruptly. He turned back to the writing-table surface again, frowned, and gave the snowman a shake. “What do you think you’re doing with the Jesus Prayer?” he asked. “This is what I was trying to get at last night. Before you told me to go chase myself. You talk about piling up treasure—money, property, culture, knowledge, and so on and so on. In going ahead with the Jesus Prayer—just let me finish, now, please—in going ahead with the Jesus Prayer, aren’t you trying to lay up some kind of treasure? Something that’s every goddam bit as negotiable as all those other, more material things? Or does the fact that it’s a prayer make all the difference? I mean by that, is there all the difference in the world, for you, in which side somebody lays up his treasure—this side, or the other? The one where thieves can’t break in, et cetera? Is that what makes the difference? Wait a second, now—just wait’ll I’m finished, please.” He sat for a few seconds watching the little blizzard in the glass sphere. Then: “There’s something about the way you’re going at this prayer that gives me the willies, if you want to know the truth. You think I’m out to s
top you from saying it. I don’t know whether I am or not—that’s a goddam debatable point—but I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it.” He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. “As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”
Franny said, as icily as she could with a faint tremor in her voice, “May I interrupt now, Zooey?”
Zooey let go the snowman and picked up a pencil to play with. “Yes, yes. Interrupt,” he said.
“I know all you’re saying. You’re not telling me one thing I haven’t thought of by myself. You’re saying I want something from the Jesus Prayer—which makes me just as acquisitive, in your word, really, as somebody who wants a sable coat, or to be famous, or to be dripping with some kind of crazy prestige. I know all that! My gosh, what kind of an imbecile do you think I am?” The tremor in her voice amounted now almost to an impediment.
“All right, take it easy, take it easy.”
“I can’t take it easy! You make me so mad! What do you think I’m doing here in this crazy room—losing weight like mad, worrying Bessie and Les absolutely silly, upsetting the house, and everything? Don’t you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That’s exactly what’s bothering me so. Just because I’m choosy about what I want—in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things—doesn’t mean I’m not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I’m more so! I don’t need the famous Zachary Glass to tell me that!” Here there was a marked break in her voice, and she began to be very attentive to Bloomberg again. Tears, presumably, were imminent, if not already on the way.
Over at the writing table, Zooey, pressing down heavily with his pencil, was filling in the “o”s on the advertisement side of a small blotter. He kept this up for a little interval, then flipped the pencil toward the inkwell. He picked up his cigar from the lip of the copper ashtray where he had placed it. It was now only about two inches in length but was still burning. He took a deep drag on it, as if it were a kind of respirator in an otherwise oxygenless world. Then, almost forcibly, he looked over at Franny again. “Do you want me to try to get Buddy on the phone for you tonight?” he asked. “I think you should talk to somebody—I’m no damn good for this.” He waited, looking at her steadily. “Franny. What about it?”
Franny’s head was bowed. She appeared to be searching for fleas in Bloomberg’s coat, her fingers very busy indeed turning back tufts of fur. She was in fact crying now, but in a very local sort of way, as it were; there were tears but no sounds. Zooey watched her for a full minute or so, then said, not precisely kindly, but without importuning, “Franny. What about it? Shall I try to get Buddy on the phone?”
She shook her head, without raising it. She went on searching for fleas. Then, after an interval, she did reply to Zooey’s question, but not very audibly.
“What?” Zooey asked.
Franny repeated her statement. “I want to talk to Seymour,” she said.
Zooey went on looking at her for a moment, his face essentially expressionless—discounting a line of perspiration on his rather long and singularly Irish upper lip. Then, with characteristic abruptness, he turned back and resumed filling in “o”s. But he put down the pencil almost immediately. He got up from the writing table—rather slowly, for him—and, taking his cigar stub with him, reassumed his one-foot-up stance at the window seat. A taller, longer-legged man—any one of his brothers, for example—might have put his foot up, might have made the stretch, with greater ease. But once Zooey’s foot was up, he gave the impression of sustaining a dancer’s position.
At first piecemeal, then point-blank, he let his attention be drawn to a little scene that was being acted out sublimely, unhampered by writers and directors and producers, five stories below the window and across the street. A fair-sized maple tree stood in front of the girls’ private school—one of four or five trees on that fortunate side of the street—and at the moment a child of seven or eight, female, was hiding behind it. She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in van Gogh’s room at Aries. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. Some fifteen feet away from the child, her dog—a young dachshund, wearing a green leather collar and leash—was sniffing to find her, scurrying in frantic circles, his leash dragging behind him. The anguish of separation was scarcely bearable for him, and when at last he picked up his mistress’s scent, it wasn’t a second too soon. The joy of reunion, for both, was immense. The dachshund gave a little yelp, then cringed forward, shimmying with ecstasy, till his mistress, shouting something at him, stepped hurriedly over the wire guard surrounding the tree and picked him up. She said a number of words of praise to him, in the private argot of the game, then put him down and picked up his leash, and the two walked gaily west, toward Fifth Avenue and the Park and out of Zooey’s sight. Zooey reflexively put his hand on a cross-piece between panes of glass, as if he had a mind to raise the window and lean out of it to watch the two disappear. It was his cigar hand, however, and he hesitated a second too long. He dragged on his cigar. “God damn it,” he said, “there are nice things in the world—and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.” Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ. Zooey turned around to look at her, somewhat censoriously.
Franny, busy with several folds of Kleenex, looked at him. “Well, I’m sorry,” she said, “Can’t I blow my nose?”
“You finished?”
“Yes, I’m finished! My gosh, what a family. You take your life in your hands if you just blow your nose.”
Zooey turned back to the window. He smoked briefly, his eyes following a pattern of concrete blocks in the school building. “Buddy once said something reasonably sensible to me a couple of years ago,” he said. “If I can remember what it was.” He hesitated. And Franny, though still busy with her Kleenex, looked over at him. When Zooey appeared to have difficulty in remembering something, his hesitation invariably interested all his brothers and sisters, and even held some entertainment value for them. His hesitations were almost always specious. Most of the time, they were direct carry-overs from the five undoubtedly formative years he had spent as a regular panelist on “It’s a Wise Child,” when, rather than seem to flaunt his somewhat preposterous ability to quote, instantaneously and, usually, verbatim, almost anything he had ever read, or even listened to, with genuine interest, he cultivated a habit of furrowing his brow and appearing to stall for time, the way the other children on the program did. His brow was furrowed now, but he spoke up rather more quickly than was customary under the circumstances, as though he sensed that Franny, his old co-panelist, had caught him at it. “He said that a man should be able to lie at the bottom of a hill with his throat cut, slowly bleeding to death, and if a pretty girl or an old woman should pass by with a beautiful jug balanced perfectly on the top of her head, he should be able to raise himself up on one arm and see the jug safely over the top of the hill.” He thought this over, then gave a mild snort. “I’d like to see him do it, the bastard.” He took a drag on his cigar. “Everybody in this family gets his goddam religion in a different package,” he commented, with a notable absence of awe in his tone. “Walt was a hot one. Walt and Boo Boo had the hottest religious philosophies in the family.” He d
ragged on his cigar, as if to offset being amused when he didn’t care to be. “Walt once told Waker that everybody in the family must have piled up one helluva lot of bad karma in his past incarnations. He had a theory, Walt, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.”